Posts Tagged ‘james baldwin’

I suggest all you Harper’s/New Yorker haters get on Lewis Lapham’s Quaterly boat. Personally, I can’t believe I’ve been out to sea so long since parting ways with The Believer, although I do still find myself running fuzzy fingers sidelong across her stilted bow anytime I see one in port.

Anyway, so umm… O yeah click of his graph for Vonnegut’s writing lesson, in which he compares the plight & plot of protagonists in popular books, film & teevee, to that of Cinderella, Gregor Samsa & the kingshit himself, Hamlet.

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.” — James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

There’s a Woody Allen joke where he and a woman mutually undress in a hotel room, until he, without his glasses on, realizes he’s standing before a mirror. That woman, if there ever were one, would be Joyce Carol Oates, also near-sighted and pensive, self-conscious with dour eyebrows. Of the life-size bronze statue of him in Oviedo, Spain (a town he featured in Vicky Cristina Barcelona), let us hope he doesn’t undress before it. He also said “Don’t knock masturbation, it’s sex with someone I love,” which Joyce read as a rejection that fateful night in that hotel room, leaving her with nothing but time, and that chest-sinking task of writing too many novels to count.